Photo: Prabir Das

Mimi Khalavati stumbled across her flair for poetry during a scriptwriting workshop. “Upon pursuing it further, I was overwhelmed by my ignorance,” she said. At "Powerful Voices" at the lawn of the Bangla Academy on the opening day of Hay, she explained that poetry is a sophisticated and difficult art. One needs to first become a reader to become a writer. The skill of lyrical expression requires dedication and clarity. She founded a creative writing school on that belief, to help others find a path of lucid self expression.

As she read out her poem, “Come Close”, dedicated to her daughter, there was an element of nostalgia and enchantment. Breathe in a perfume deep enough to find language for it.

Dr. Fakrul Alam, Bangladeshi academic and writer, asked her about her connection to Iran. She began by saying that her relationship to Iran, her motherland, is one which is both a 'blessing' and a 'loss'. She left Iran at a very young age to attend a boarding school in England, and didn't come back for 17 years. By that time, she had mostly forgotten how to speak in Farsi, and felt a deep disconnection. She said this “sense of something central missing” is present in her work. She shared her experience of writing to her mother. All the other girls would write in their native tongue and she could not. Such moments created a slight sense of isolation in the “small world of a girl's school in England”. She reminisced about when she moved back to Iran: she met aunts and uncles she had never seen before. Yet the sentiments of family exist in her poetry. She spoke of her mother's hobby of making artificial flowers out of silk and how that was inspiration for a poem. The sense of something lost, something “attainable”, echoes in soft, lyrical words.

Eventually, she moved on to theatre and then to directing. She soon found her voice in poetry, something she did not expect but as she read out her poems we knew that it came from within.